Heroic Doses (Volume I)

Maybe it was unintentionally watching the “Sterling drops LSD” episode of Mad Men on Robert Anton Wilson’s birthday, or maybe because after watching that I stumbled upon an acid themed Politically Incorrect Timothy Leary tribute from back in the 90’s featuring R.A.W. and David Cross (no shit)—but I thought maybe this week I’d delve into just what happens when I take what Terrence Mckenna would refer to as a heroic dose of western society’s pre-eminent super hallucinogen. This is the kind of thing that got me into the occult in the first place like a lot of other people, and it’s maybe a part of the reason that if I had to put a finger on where the sixties hippie movement went wrong a bit (aside from the whole government beating them the fuck down thing), it’d be that they, you know, did waaaaaaay too much acid. Not like a little bit too much. Way too much. Way way way way waaaaaaaay too much fucking acid. I feel like maybe I should say it again. Waaaaaaaaay too much acid. I believe Mr. Wilson even conceded this himself, but that’s beside the point. All I know is that if I partied like those dudes did back in the day, I’d have ended up in a mental institution a long time ago rather than sitting here writing this here strangeness for y’all fine people.

So again, this is some stuff from my first book, but if you get to the end there’s some after the fact occult analysis which is beyond bizarre. As a lead up, I’d probably tripped about seven or eight times at this point in my life and I was probably about twenty one. I only thought I was getting one and a half tabs, but you never know how that stuff is cut which is part of the problem with its illegality. And away we go:

“One night, a scary Wiccan gutter punk co-worker of mine called me to inform me that he had acquired some gel tab acid. Bored and willing to have my rational mind torn to shreds anew, I gladly procured a few tabs of the amaranthine substance.

As with the mushroom shock years prior, I had no real idea what I was getting myself into. During a typical trip on shrooms or acid it takes roughly an hour to start feeling the effects. This time was different. Within ten minutes I started feeling a little off. I walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water. After turning away from the sink glass full, I noticed that there were pulsating holes suddenly torn in the wall. Inside, a host of what appeared to be anthropomorphized microorganisms were peering back at me, almost surprised that I could see them. That was the beginning of what would be probably the most otherworldly 40 hours or so of my life.

After returning to the living room it became quickly apparent that I was completely unable to deal with my roommates and their friends who had stopped over to party for the night. They were talking to me and I was barely responding as I slowly became more and more immersed in the fantastical universe quickly merging with my own. Fortunately, one of my neighbors was out of town and left me the key to his place. I politely excused myself to deal with the descending madness alone.

The second I entered his apartment and sat down on the couch I began staring at the wall transfixed. A large resplendently bejeweled feminine reptile of sorts began to emerge. It had a writhing serpentine crown topping its long cylindrical protrusion of a neck. The neck extended away from the wall towards me as its head, replete with a forked deformation of a tongue, began to circle around me as if scouring prey. Then, without warning it began to playfully lick at various parts of my captivated visage. Each time it made contact with my flesh an electric tingle of near orgasmic pleasure shot through my body. This process continued for an unknown duration, until eventually the inexplicable being receded into the wall from which it had sprung forth.

As if that weren’t curious enough, the entire surface of the wall now started to slowly melt away. I began to notice that beneath its veneer, rested an unknown, anciently enshrined insectile god comprised from a thousand black transcendent eyes. They were all bound together as one with an inorganic sentient webbing of sorts, and collectively began scouring the secret depths of my immortal soul. This trans-dimensional hive mind supercreature was unquestionably trying to communicate with me through telepathic inner gestures. There was a seemingly incomprehensible dialogue being initiated between us, yet it didn’t take long for me to at least partially understand what was being conveyed.

My entire perceptional field was being invaded by an alien intelligence which dwells within me for reasons unknown. It was showing me glimpses of its world, which is composed of thoughts and impossibly complex imagery. The primary message that it wanted me to comprehend was that it owned me. There was no question there. This thing had known me before I was “born” and would know me long after I “died”. It was responsible for bringing me to this plane for whatever reason and I was here to do its bidding. Finally, after engaging with the creature for an inordinate amount of time the wall once again sealed itself shut.

I, as if compelled by some unconscious urge, suddenly felt compelled to listen to some music. I had just bought a CD by the German techno innovator Alec Empire called The Destroyer. I hadn’t even gotten a chance to listen to it yet and now, for some reason, seemed like the perfect time to give it a whirl. When the frentic onslaught of rapid fire beats hit my flesh I was possessed. A beam of kaleidoscopic light poured through the ceiling directly into my skull and I began to move against my will. I was no longer in control of my own actions and danced spasmodically like an epileptic simian puppet. As I danced, fast transforming aberrations swirled about my head. I could see the trails of their motion as I floated through an ocean of translucent ectoplasm.

When the CD finally ended, I began to regain control of my own actions, although something still seemed off. It was much akin to what I had gone through days after ingesting the mushrooms years prior. I was simultaneously safely inside of my body while floating above it–just behind the back of my head. It was unreasonably pleasant. I watched myself pace about my friend’s apartment erratically for hours.

At long last I found myself back in body and lying on the couch. As I lay still, rapid-fire images from the other side penetrated my body. Each wave of new footage came replete with corresponding physical sensations of unbridled ecstasy. I was transformed into a living, breathing, constantly morphing piece of art. Not just ordinary art either. Art better than the finest produced by the world’s most creative minds, each image lasting for only a fraction of a second before vanishing into hyperspace. I have oft opined that if ordinary people could see what I can muster in the midst of a hallucinogenic frenzy I would be the richest man on the planet. The uber-intelligent beauty coursing through the very core of my existence is irrefutable proof of a higher spiritual destiny.

This inhuman collusion between flesh and art continued for probably another fifteen hours at least by my calculations. Even when I managed to escape to the dream world, the images persisted. I remember closing my eyes and watching the interplanetary cavalcade of concepts. Arcane lifecycles were rapidly forming and disintegrating, releasing condensed bursts of infinite awe into my proverbial spine. “

Okay, on a rather hilarious note, in reading that again, I’m realizing that I completely left out the part where I had to work an entire shift at the job I had at the time without coming down or getting any sleep. Did it no problem I might point out, although I remember getting an odd twinge every time I touched anything with my hands, so I went through an entire night at work touching things with my hands as little as possible. Makes sense right? When I took the stuff I didn’t know I was going to be up for forty plus hours. Again with the dosage issues. Also, on another hilarious note, the same thing happened the first time I ever took LSD. Couldn’t sleep, had to be at work the next day at like two, worked my shift no problem. Nobody knew the difference.

But moving on, the oddest thing about all this in retrospect is that it was my first encounter with what I later came to refer to as “The Thousand Eyed God Within.” Multi-eyed entities are apparently a fairly common theme in psychedelic art and from some reports, a fairly common hallucination. Before I’d ever seen pieces by people like Alex Grey, Luke Brown, and Emily Pothast:

I’d seen that stuff on my own, independently. Now, this is a fertile new area of research as I tried to have my librarian wife do a project on it while she was in grad school and she couldn’t dig up a whole lot of intel, but ultimately concluded it was just something that needed to be explored further and hadn’t. Her professor gave her a great grade (just saying kids). I’d been following it because years later while on mushrooms I had another wave of multi-eyed invasion visions, which gave me the implications that it might be the creative intelligence responsible for all forms of insectile and crustacean intelligence (buy my book, out spring/summer 2013). I have a bunch of theories, and there’s also what I’ve been told, that “it’s a separate, entity” and that “it’s always been a pervert”. Who knows what to think about all that channeling stuff, but here’s where we get into even more compelling questions.

Went to bed around 9:45 pm. Woke up about a half hour later with odd noises in my room and a familiar cloud of black mist hovering above my head (this has been happening for a while now). Proceeded to meditate a bit and had what’s been going on for quite a while now explained a bit more. What am I talking about? The concept of a holy guardian angel and corresponding guardian daemon. This dialogue about what to do with my life has been going on for a while, despite the fact I thought these concepts ridiculous just years prior. They’re a team. One shows me how to succeed here, the other how to ascend to the higher realms. Both are valuable and we typically look at the daemonic elements as being “evil” although this is a gross oversimplification. They definitely like to laugh at our stupidity and fuck with us, I will say that.

So, for some reason I actually sort of telepathically inquire as to the nature of my guardian daemon who appears to be dominating the conversation at this point. I am instantly overwhelmed by the sensation of the word Beelzebub repeating over and over in my head. This scares me a bit for obvious reasons and I wonder if I’m just sort of inventing it.

Then it occurs to me that I listened to a podcast about a month back where Alan Moore talked about summoning and banishing a daemon who identified itself as Azazel (this might be wrong). He first asked if it was Beelzebub and it told him no, but showed him an image of a wall of eyes as if to explain, this is what Beelzebub would look like. Hmmm, much like the multi-eyed hallucinations I’ve had on psychedelics and written about fairly extensively. It’s a fairly common hallucination that shows up in tons of psych art. I’d actually been doing some of that myself recently.

So, is Beelzebub my daemonic guardian entity?

Upon further investigation, Beelzebub also goes way back throughout history and was the Egyptian Enlil apparently. Even appears to humans in the insectile form of a fly. Just sayin’. I have no idea what to do with this information, but I’m open to suggestions. It’s all more than a bit nutter. Maybe in another twenty years I’ll have the balls to try some sort of summoning ritual. Then again, maybe everyone’s better off if I don’t do that kind of thing.

Thad McKraken is a psychedelic writer, musician, visual artist, filmmaker, Occultist, and pug enthusiast based out of Seattle. He is the author of the books The Galactic Dialogue: Occult Initiations and Transmissions From Outside of Time, both of which can be picked up on Amazon super cheap.

Sorry to sound nitpicky but titling your post as a “heroic dose” and then going on to tell your story about taking gel acid of a dosage you admit you weren’t sure of isn’t exactly being true to Terrence McKenna’s use of the phrase. Mckenna said a heroic dose, at least of psilocybin mushrooms, was 5 dried grams. Acid? I never heard him talk about in that way. Perhaps he did. Granted, it sounds like you took one hell of a dose and sounds pretty damn heroic to me. Sounds like it was cut with speed too.

Lizzie

Awesome writing. Sounds like a crazy experience, and I had some laughs too. The whole thing sounds intense, I’ll be looking forward to reading the book!

Thad McKraken

Good call. I thought about that myself and really this is the lead up to another column I’m going to write about a friend of mine who intentionally took a “heroic dose” of mushrooms (he’d done mild doses before) which turned him from an Atheist to an Agnostic pretty much over night. That’s the most I’ve ever gotten and the weirdest acid/mushroom trip I’ve ever had. I can still see that obsidian thousand eyed daemon in my head and there was the echoing sound from it’s dimension. “Oct-with-ita-popita, Oct-with-ita-popita” – over and over again. That’s the best I can put it into words.

But yeah, that’s the thing. These drugs effect people differently. I know people that have taken 10 hits and have had nothing like that happen to them. If I meditate on weed, I see visions, hear music in my head, etc – which doesn’t happen to most people. Most folks I know don’t even see visions when they trip. I see shit everywhere. I even left out the part of that trip where I threw on some porno and Jenna Jameson looking at me from across the room made me cum without even touching myself. Again, something that’s never happened before or since.

Proof positive of the notion that taking acid is a shitload more interesting and fun than reading about someone elses’ trip. In fact, I’d say almost taking acid is a shitload more interesting than reading about someone elses’ trip.

Thad McKraken

I’m in the acid marketing department, but yeah, get out there and experiment yourself. Just you know, use it ritualistically and in moderation.

Dickvanballsack

I feel LSD is a drug that should be avoided in heroic doses (due to my experience and problems that arise). Maybe after a long abstinance of pot, shrooms even, or short acting psychedelics like DMT or Salvia. A man is making a grave mistake taking a chemical that lasts 12 hours in heroic doses. I won’t go into detail, but it’s very dangerous. Even a length mushroom trip for that time period is pushing it. Light doses long acting chemicals heroic doses for something that lasts 5-30 minuites. Heed my warning!